Thoughts Turning to Alabama

This piece began life as a comment on today’s News Page. Then I thought maybe it was worth sharing more broadly.

***********

Like everyone else, I’ve got an eye cocked on Alabama. I’m hoping the futures markets are wrong, and don’t see this thing coming: they give Jones about a 1 in 3 shot. I’m hoping they under-estimate factors that might make turnout in Alabama skewed blue as happened in our Virginia elections. The passionate against the demoralized.

Also I’ve been wondering how much damage it would do to the Republicans if Moore were defeated, and how much if he won. I’ve read commentators saying that the GOP will lose which ever way it goes.

I suppose that’s so, but my guess is that Moore’s being defeated is likely best all around in the battle in which we are engaged in America right now.

Maybe Moore would be a good albatross around the necks of the Republicans (the Party of the sexual assaulter in the Oval Office and the sexual predator over in the Senate)– now with that issue having become so paramount at this cultural moment.

But I think there are already so many flagrant albatrosses to hang around the Republicans’ necks that the value of one more — even about sexual misconduct against non-consenting women — is not worth the Senate seat.

(The problem, is not with the lack of damning GOP albatrosses but rather with the lack of power with which the Democrats hammer the Republicans with the albatrosses that are there.)

Moreover, the Rs need to get a message about the public’s rejection of what they’ve become. The Rs losing a Senate seat from Alabama — Ala-freaking-bama ! — should be a signal to the Rs that the public is not going to keep giving them power no matter how ugly they become. So maybe they need to clean up their act. Or if they don’t, maybe they are on the road to self-destruction.

(Though I am also worried that they may be on the road to taking the United States even further into the darkness of the kind visible in the souls of Trump and Moore.)

So I’m hoping for a Jones victory– but I’m not counting on it. And I’m ready to hope that if Moore does get elected, he’ll prove to be the toxin that continually saps the GOP, and the gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats, that some say he’d be.